‘Alternative history’ researcher and author Graham Hancock has long postulated that a cataclysm some 12,000 years ago might have wiped out advanced civilisations. In his most recent book Magicians of the Gods (Amazon US/Amazon UK) he discusses at length the Younger Dryas period (c. 12,900 to c. 11,700 calendar years ago), which began when temperatures plummeted over the course of just a few decades – and the ‘heretical’ theory that this event may have been caused by a comet impact.

Now, two new papers recently published in respected journals may perhaps provide material support for that idea. The first, published late last week in Nature’s “Scientific Reports”, notes the discovery of “a distinct platinum anomaly spread widely across North America and dating to the Younger Dryas (YD) onset”, supporting the conclusions of previous papers that have provided evidence for an impact event at that time.

The presence of platinum is a strong indicator of an impact event: as lead author Christopher Moore has pointed out, the element “is very rare in Earth’s crust, but it is common in asteroids and comets”; and previous studies have also found “a rise in platinum concentrations over 14 years and subsequent drop during the following 7 years” that is consistent with “the known residence time of stratospheric dust”.

Christopher Moore says that his team’s finding on elevated levels of platinum…

…is a confirmation of data previously reported for the Younger-Dryas onset several years ago in a Greenland ice-core. The authors for that study concluded that the most likely source of such platinum enrichment was from the impact of an extraterrestrial object.

Our data show that this anomaly is present in sediments from U.S. archaeological sites that date to the start of the Younger-Dryas event. It is continental in scale – possibly global – and it’s consistent with the hypothesis that an extraterrestrial impact took place.

The other new paper has just been published in the journal Geomorphology (“A model for the geomorphology of the Carolina Bays). It also provides evidence for an impact event around that time, suggesting that the Carolina Bays may be the remains of “oblique conical craters formed on ground liquefied by the seismic shock waves of secondary impacts of glacier ice boulders ejected by an extraterrestrial impact on the Laurentide Ice Sheet”.

The evidence for an extinction level comet-impact event in North America 12,800 years ago, setting in motion the mysterious episode of megafaunal extinctions, floods and freezing temperatures that geologists call the Younger Dryas, continues to grow stronger with a new paper published in the distinguished peer-reviewed journal Geomorphology. You can read a discussion of the implications of the paper, and you can download a pdf of the paper itself, here.

Those who have read my book Magicians of the Gods, now available in an extended and updated paperback edition, will be aware that I focus extensively on the Younger Dryas cataclysm in which I believe not only mammoths, not only the hunter-gatherer “Clovis” culture, but also an advanced prehistoric civilization, hitherto the stuff only of myths and legends, was lost to history. This, in my view, was when we became a species with amnesia.

Check out my previous post on this subject, with more links and papers, here.

You can of course read Graham’s thoughts on this topic at length by picking up a copy of Magicians of the Gods from Amazon US or Amazon UK.

I’ve thumbed through Magicians of the Gods now, but it’s going to take a closer reading before I can comment any further about his prediction. There doesn’t appear to be any significant discussion on it on the web, which surprises me (since the book was first published in 2015).

P.S. I’m just going to make a few observations, because it may be awhile before I get around to doing a proper review of this book.

1) Why would the builders of Gobekli Tepe predict a disaster 11,600 years in the future and then bury this structure. The “time capsule” theory just doesn’t compute. Also, there have been many disasters in the intervening 11,600 years that should have been worthy of prediction.

2) Suggesting that a future disaster involving the short period Comet Encke or it’s debris trail is somehow associated with the precessional cycle is just ridiculous. This is the kind of thing that makes the alternative field a laughing stock.

3) Although the book is written in superb journalistic style that we have come to expect from Graham Hancock, it doesn’t do Clube & Napier or Firestone, et. al., any real favors either. Hancock is willy-nilly lumping maverick scientific comet research with a vague Ojibwa prophecy, the musings of early Christian Period writer Solinus and Mayan Calendar speculation, as well as a fanciful interpretation of Pillar 43 at Gobekli Tepe. It would have better for Hancock to have simply reported on these diverse topics without drawing faulty conclusions and suggesting relationships that make no sense.

4) The book’s index doesn’t contain central items, such as Objibwa, Solinus, or even Encke, so it’s hard to quickly locate them in the text.

Encke’s big brother!I recently acquired this book also, but have yet to read it in full.

To the best of my knowledge, there is no evidence for any such impact occurring in 2030 by a ‘30km-wide dark fragment.’ Comet Encke does not pose an immediate risk & certainly not on the scale that Hancock details. If memory serves me correctly, it is not so much Encke that is said to be the danger, but an alleged mega-comet (still resident somewhere within the Taurid debris stream) that comet Encke (along with the asteroids Hephestos & 1982TA) was once part of…

Asteroids and OrangesI have no problem with Hancock raising public awareness of the threat of impact events from space. Previously unknown/untracked objects are whizzing by Earth all the time. However, I do object to Hancock making bizarre and unnecessary correlations involving the precessional cycle. We don’t even presently know what causes precession with absolute certainty. It could potentially even involve a “Perturber” such as the mysterious “Planet 9” now being sought. In such case, comets may be getting spawned at regular intervals (i.e., tied to the precessional cycle), however we shouldn’t confuse the threat of future comets coming into the inner solar system with ones like Encke that have already done so.

Obviously what happened around 12,800 years ago was quite exceptional, even by Earth standards. Such events (leading to mass extinctions) do not occur every 12,800 years, and if they did, then intelligent life on Earth is probably futile. We should definitely try to discern what did happen at the end of the last Ice Age. It’s very strange and suspicious that some researchers confirm the presence of nano-diamonds and others can’t find that evidence.

I personally don’t think it’s necessary to assume that the end of the Younger Dryas was caused by the same phenomenon that started it. We were coming out of an Ice Age. The Younger Dryas Comet (or whatever you want to call the event) only postponed the inevitable.

In my own personal investigation, I found evidence in the data for a number of long-period comets that were causing havoc on Earth during the past 10,000 years. At least a couple of these recurring nightmares were being tracked by the Mayans and their Calendar. However, these particular threats seem to have played out. Of course that’s not cause for complacency.